Deiseil: Dancing in Time ★★★★★
theSpace (Venue 45) until 16 August
Deiseil: Dancing in Time from Deiseil Airson Dannsa is a spine-tingling story of how stepdance, Scotland’s percussive dance, was lost across the Atlantic – and found again.
Told through music, the sound of feet, Gaelic and English, the show deftly weaves together live performance with archive recordings, and brings the cultures of communities separated by history back to contemporary life.
As dancer Alison Carlyle freewheels around the performance space, we see that Scottish stepdance isn’t stiff and high-kicking like its Irish counterpart; but like a relaxed, jazz version, with a heel-toe shuffle making percussive rhythms – a rare groove, indeed. These sounds can themselves serve as the music of the dance; or can interact with fiddle or vocal music as the dancer improvises a combination of steps. Amy Geddes accompanies with uplifting, supple fiddle playing, whether plucking or strumming in a quiet moment or stepping up to a flying double-time.
The stepdance rhythms can be four to the floor or syncopated, and feet cross diagonally at times almost like a Charleston (based on another indigenous dance brought to the Americas, by enslaved West African people). In the case of Scottish stepdancing, the cultural memory of the dance was taken to Canada as emigration and the Highland clearances saw the Gàidhealtachd’s population halved between the 19th and 20th centuries.
At one point, a stunning recording is played of a traditional puirt-a-beul, the unaccompanied ‘mouth music’ in the haunting 5-note scale of Gaelic folk song. Our performers heard occasional talk that this was a song to dance to, but could only make sense of this idea when they managed to reunite in the 1990s with the living tradition of Cape Breton stepdance. The governing body of Highland Dancing is also indicted for their suppression of stepdance through standardising steps and encouraging soft pumps over hard soles. This is realised with gentle subversion, as the arcane rules are intoned in voiceover while our fiddler poses uncomfortably like a prize cow, draped in Royal Stewart tartan pinned with a competition number.
Gerry Mulgrew directs with powerful simplicity and restraint. On a square central space, the two performers wheel round each other, sometimes in distant orbit, sometimes locked together. Lighting ranges from naturalistic, like the daily motion of the sun, to geometric, with spotlights throwing shapes across the floor.
At one point, visual interest is added with a simple washing-line hung with cloths bearing images of the broken-down settlements dotted across the Gàidhealtachd. But only the performers’ subtle movement work is needed on a bare stage to evoke the stories of forced emigration, conveying the distance and heartbreak without sentimentalism.
The voiceovers are beautifully integrated, enabling the production to weave together the contemporary practice of stepdancing with the voices of generations of tradition-bearers from Cape Breton and the Highlands. Only one exception stands out, where a segment on the history of social dancing is announced in voiceover for no obvious reason. It takes a village to make a Fringe show as well as to raise a child, and there are fully three dozen people named in the fascinating programme (linked to here), which importantly includes all details of the music, interviewees, and readings. Among them is Aonghas MacNeacail’s poem Gaelic is Alive – heard first in the original, then in English translation. ‘Dance, dance, it’s work to be dancing’ is the joyful conclusion. The triumphant truth of his credo can be seen in this unique and inspiring piece.
Julia Amour, ALL EDINBURGH THEATRE